The emergence of the cloud for computing applications has increased the demand for off-site installations, known as data centers, that store data and run applications accessed by remotely connected computer device users. Such data centers typically have massive numbers of devices such as servers, switches and storage devices to store and manage data, and so they may be accessed in a convenient manner by remote computer users. A typical data center has physical rack or chassis structures with attendant power and communication connections. Such racks may hold multiple network devices, that may be swapped in and out of the rack. The racks are arranged in rows throughout the room or rooms of the data center. Each rack includes a frame that has horizontally oriented slots that may hold multiple devices such as servers, switches, and storage devices. There are many such devices stacked in such rack structures found in a modern data center. For example, some data centers have tens of thousands of servers, and attendant storage devices, and network switches. Thus, a typical data center may include tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of devices in hundreds or thousands of individual racks.
A typical rack includes a chassis that has side walls joined by a bottom wall and a top wall. The rack may also include various electronic components that may be used to support devices that are installed in the rack. For example, a rack system may include a power distribution board that includes power supply units to supply power to the devices in the rack. Each of the side walls has multiple registration features, such as a groove or a tab that are periodically spaced apart. Multiple shelves are installed between the side walls on the registration features. Once installed, each shelf may hold different network devices. The rack system typically has a fixed height that separates each shelf. Different network devices such as servers, switches, routers or the like are carried in removable sled structures, that may be inserted on one of the shelves in the rack. The size of typical sled components is based in standard height units. For example, height may be expressed in terms of “U”, and therefore a standard 1 U rack-mount server is 1.75 inches high, while a 2 U server measures three inches in height. Typical network devices may be designed with different standard units of height.
Currently, most racks have slots created by the shelves that have the same height because the registration features are set in the side walls. This arrangement works well when the network components in the rack are the same or have identical sizes, but also restricts the inner space of the rack to sleds of one size. However, since network components and their corresponding sleds often have different sizes (e.g., different widths and heights), different chassis designs must be used for different components, thereby increasing expense and complexity. Therefore, in order to accommodate different height devices in one chassis, the chassis structure must be replaced to provide the proper space.
A typical chassis also includes a vertical bus bar. The bus bar is a fixed structure that allows power cables to be connected from a power supply to the inserted sleds. The position of the bus bar is determined by the pitch of the sled. In current chassis designs, the bus bar prevents freely changing the quantity of the sleds in the same slot because the number of power connections is limited.
Thus, there is a need for an adaptable chassis that can be easily adjusted to accommodate different sleds having different heights. There is also a need for a chassis that allows the adjustment of the position of bus bars to allow different quantities of sleds to be inserted. There is a further need for an adaptable chassis that allows ready adjustment of support structures to accommodate a changing variety of different sized sleds.